Tag Archives: Lady of Burlesque

I noticed Jake Cole doing a bunch of Nicholas Ray posts over the past week or so, and turns out they’re part of a much larger blogathan celebrating the great director (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, etc.). Ray would’ve been 100 years old this year, so it’s fitting to see a great turnout for the blogathon, and a variety of people participating. I haven’t had time to look through everything yet, but this should be some very good reading.

Only a few weeks after Joe Cornish’s excellent genre film Attack the Block was released in US theatres, we started hearing reports of riots in London perpetrated by “hoodies,” gangs of kids wearing hooded sweatshirts from the poorest part of London. Hoodies also happen to be the main characters and indeed, the heroes of Attack the Block. Far-removed from both the real-life riots and the setting of Attack the Block in the US, it’s impossible to see one and not think of the other. The rioting has died down now, but this article from Oliver Lyttelton (residing in South London) is still an excellent reading of the two against each other. He wrote it on time; blame me for the delay in recommending it. :)

This article (excerpted from Kermode’s newest book) has been stirring up discussion and controversy since it was posted a week or so ago. The basic premise is that people go to see movies based on hype and are often disappointed and don’t like the tentpole blockbusters even though the box office receipts prove they paid to see them. Kermode argues, if people are going to see a tentpole release because it’s a tentpole release, then they don’t have to be dumb to succeed – you can make intelligent blockbusters ike Inception and make a ton of money AND have audiences who are better satisfied at the end of it all. I think his argument is a bit facile (there are plenty of tentpoles that fail despite hype, and Inception is a fringe case based on Nolan’s name that’s not easily repeatable), but his general stance that we shouldn’t settle for whatever dumb tripe the studios throw at us even if it’s shiny and glossy I can get totally get behind.

Starting off with a general history of burlesque, then moving on to its most famous practitioner Gypsy Rose Lee, then on to Lady of Burlesque, the film version of Lee’s novel The G-String Murders, this post is entertaining from start to finish. Lee was originally meant to star in the film adaptation of her novel, but the role eventually went to Barbara Stanwyck instead, and Brandie reviews the film, recognizing Stanwyck’s contribution to what it otherwise a relatively routine film. I’ve seen the film, but finding out about the background of burlesque and the project’s history was really interesting.

Here Bordwell talks about editing trends in the 1910s, showing the very birth of mature continuity editing as editors start cutting to closeups and insets to add emotional and thematic content to the story. He also looks at some very early 1910s compositions, noting that they often have a lot more going on in the frame than later films – sometimes too much for us to easily figure out what’s going on, as our attention is distrated to different parts of the frame. (Note this is a different thing than using deep focus – a good deep focus shot will have everything available to see, but still be able to draw our attention as necessary for the narrative.) His hypothesis is that people actually understood images differently then, and we have lost the ability to understand compositions like that. Based on my own experiences with certain styles of painting and stained-glass windows, I think it’s an intriguing possibility.

An exposition and appreciation of one of my all-time favorite musical numbers from one of my all-time favorite musicals. I love Gold Diggers of 1933 to bits, and the musical numbers are some of the best Warren and Dubin ever wrote, or Busby Berkeley ever filmed. The film is notable for its very head-on approach to the Depression, and nowhere is that more evident than in this number, as Lara indicates very well.

Jim Emerson has made no bones of his dislike for incoherent action scenes (and I agree with him upon this point), and here he goes into again, discussing the current trend toward what he calls “chaos cinema” and going back and forth on what filmmakers have said about it themselves and then what they actually do in their films. Hint, they’re not always consistent. He also includes a video from Matthias Stork that details, with video clips, the kind of thing they’re talking about. It’s a really good video, and a good article.

A genuinely hilarious review of the film that has, in some ways, become the template for romantic dramas. And yet, does it deserve to be? I haven’t actually seen Love Story myself, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of Wilde.Dash’s approach to reviewing it. I literally laughed out loud a few times, and it’s rare that I read reviews that are that engaging.

Angela runs down the whole month of TCM programming, with some excellent recommendations. I do this weekly in my Film on TV posts, but Angela’s focus on TCM means her coverage of their programming is even better than mine, and has more of a focus on classic Hollywood fans. She especially highlights The Story of Temple Drake (Sep 14) and The Constant Nymph (Sep 28), two films that haven’t been seen basically since their release due to censorship and copyright issues, until TCM worked with restoration teams at MoMA and the Library of Congress to bring the two films to the TCM Film Festival. This month is the first time the two films have played on the channel, though, and believe me, they’re both worth it.

A really fun post from the Morlocks, highlighting a whole bunch of bizarrely-titled films – some of the usual suspects like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but also a bunch that I have never heard of before and definitely gave me a good laugh. Not to mention the posters that go along with them are usually priceless as well.

So the music video for the latest Sleater-Kinney song “A New Wave” (off their recently released album No Cities to Love, their first album in ten years) is set in Tina’s room from Bob’s Burgers. I wouldn’t consider myself a mega Sleater-Kinney fan or anything, but I do like them and have been glad to hear new music from them. Plus Jonathan and I have been enjoying getting into Bob’s Burgers recently, so this was a fun surprise to see in my feed this morning!

I usually dislike “every xyz ever” supercuts, but this one is wonderful. It’s 13 minutes long and doesn’t even outstay its welcome! I’m much more familiar with the sardonic Daffy Duck of the 1950s cartoons, but now I’m going to have to go back and watch a bunch of the earlier, crazier ones!

I usually don’t post too much about the Oscars, but these pie chart breakdowns of the Best Picture nominees are pretty funny (I’m sure I would think they were even funnier if I’d seen any of the movies!). Also, I need to post more image posts to get the really old Criterion ones out of the sidebar. :)

January Criterions have been announced! Most exciting one to me is another addition to their collection of Preston Sturges films, with The Palm Beach Story. I can’t rank this one quite as high as Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve, but it’s close on their heels in terms of straight-up zany fun. I’m so glad to see Criterion release a Hollywood classic like this just about every month.

Also releasing: Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (an excellent and evocative film I’d love to own in a Criterion edition), Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénega, which I’ll admit I’ve never heard of. What Criterions are going on your wishlist for January?

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939′s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”